This hysteria is typical of slashdot and a load of rubbish; Here in Switzerland Computers with internet connections have paid the radio/tv tax for years now, and the sun still shines over the alps. The German law is exactly the same as the Swiss one and works like this: Each household pays a monthly or quarterly bill to the state run TV and Radio stations. They pay the same amount no matter how many computers, TVs or radios they have. The bill is one single price per household. Each company pays only one bill no matter how many computers or TVs they have. It is NOT based on the number of computers.
Slashdot and its sensationalist attempts to gather hits and therefore drive up ad revenue make their comments on any news event seem very hypocritical.
I as a person, and my company have been through the OSS problem a number of times. Either extremely bad support for which we were paying (ariadne cms), a bad decision by us leading to enormous inhouse maintenance costs (switching from SuSE to Gentoo) or ending up having to fix some software problems ourselves (OCS/GLPI inventory software). In the end we have decided that even though the support of commercial vendors might cost a lot up front, it is worth its weight in gold if there ever is a problem.
The article is right (although the guy seems to be comparing different types of products to one another, as other have pointed out) in that the costs of OSS can be really damaging.
That said, it would be nice if there were local companies offering support for Linux shops.
Microsoft's biggest problem in the mp3 space is very similar to their biggest problems in the gaming space, portable telephone space and other spaces where they haven't had a monopoly for 15 years: Legacy, baby.
I personally have nothing against Microsoft products. Indeed, I use Windows all day at work and am fairly happy with it. I really hate Microsoft's business practices, though.
But Microsoft suffers from the fact that people who have invested heavily in other products will not be likely to change to an unknown, start from scratch device that offers me no benefits above my iPod. I have spent some $300 on the iTunes Store and even though MS says I can get that all from Microsoft (I'm still waiting for the smallprint on that one - Does Microsoft allow me to burn the stuff to CD or keep it for even if I decide Micorosoft are a bunch of lying fuckers and stop paying?)
Make no m istake, Microsoft will throw money and time at this until it does get a marketshare, much like they did with PDAs (which are now more or less irrelevant), mobile phones (people don't want a fucking start button on their phones you dumb bastards), or game consoles (Say thanks to Sony for fucking up, it certainly wasn't due to your talent you useless bunch of shits)
A Microsoft nerd with hurt feelings comparing a large commercial company, i.e. Micorosoft, to the scientific establishment is a bit less than ingenious. I'll leave as an excercide for you to work out why, sunshine.
I see people, even die hard Windows users, buying either MacBook Pros, or Mac Minis, like its going out of fashion, and I don't even live in the US. In fact, the only people I still see buying Windows are the poor suckers who think Outlook is a good mail client, and that Windows networking is acceptable.
If I was in the Bush family, I could pass nuclear physics by pissing out the window in the morning, or are you trying to claim that the Shrub got where he has without the help of family and friends in high places?
Original: "will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there" Translation: "We're dumb enough to think that fake positive publicity pressure tricks that work in the USA will work in the EU"
If a boom does finally start in ray traced realtime engines, which I somehow doubt, Microsoft won't like it. They have spent a whole lot of money to make DirectX a monopoly and thereby control the games market. this would push the whole effort overboard, with time. Microsoft would have to make their DirectXRayTrace the sole API before they'd be happy again.
look at my post further up. We use them both and they work extremely well. If you need tips or help, drop me a mail at theolein at gmail dot com. I've even written a custom installer for the OSx client.
At my organisation, we went with two open source projects,OCS NG and GLPI. OCS NG is a client-server solution that uses a client, written in php, but compiled as an exe installer and running as a service on Windows (There's also clients available for Solaris, Linus and OSX), that collects information on hardware and software from the client computer (the source is avaiulable and you can edit it if you want). The OCS NG server collects the data from the clients via an xml-rpc call and sorts and stores them (you can delete clients, filter software into categories etc). The GLPI server is the main helpdesk and tracking app. It works hand-in-hand with the OCS NG server and is really good, and provides detailed data on clients, plus the ability to do financial info on them and reporting.
We have both running on a gentoo server and the level of control is excellent.
The downside is that both are from France. The English translation is less than perfect (but we're in switzerland and so we use it in French). I can only recommed the software though. No licensing issues or huge costs from proprietry vendors adn the ability to modify the source code is a god send. We modified GLPI to print labels via an xsl transform of the xml output to xslfo for Apache's FOP.
If anyone remembers the CherryOS fiasco of two years back when that weird Albanian in Hawaii stole the PearPC source and claimed it as his own "80% native ppc speed" clone, the same Leander Kahney wrote one of the biggest bullshit articles I've ever read, claiming that he felt it was the real thing (even though it didn't even get past the boot screen), and that Apple should start worrying about its hardware sales. I wrote to the guy and flamed his butt off for being such a bullshitter. The guy wrote back telling me that I was just being typical of Mac zealots. Fast forward to the present and lo and behold, we have the same brain dead idiot making the same negative "Apple's dying" (but please read my crap anyway) statements like "but that's for the geeks" at a DEVELOPER conference!
The guy is simply a more effeminate version of Dvorak. It's one of those minor trendy things amongst pseudo intellectuals (Boing Boing's rant on Apple because Apple hadn't released the sources to the x86 XNU kernel yet, for instance) to be mildly critical of Apple, YET STILL SPEND GOD KNOWS HOW MUCH TO GO AND WATCH A PRODUCT INTRODUCTION SPEECH! Apple must laugh itself to tears at morons like this who pay large amounts of cash to them for the privilege of being trendily critical of Apple.
Make no mistake, Apple is no saviour and there are many things that I personally prefer in Linux and Windows (Linux for its openess and configurability and Windows for its GUI responsiveness), but acting like a clueless consumer at a developer conference only makes you look dumber than you are, or, in this case, exactly as dumb as you are.
Here, in admittedly tiny Switzerland, we have the highest percentage of Mac users anywhere, period. While I'm one of those and also work with Linux and Windows, the fact is that Macs are incredibly popular, and if people have money (Switzerland is fairly well off), they will buy them. Sweden, for example, which is also fairly well off, also has a high percentage of Mac users. The fact is that Macs are simply a bit simpler to use and somewhat more robust against user wear and tear than Windows.
I didn't aim to insult you personally, even if you feel like I did, but was merely trying to point out that your actions in the face of a cop with his foot in the door (leaning on the door) were less than wise, in my opnion. I don't know if you grew up in a sheltered environment, or had some kind of idea that the police are nice upright citizens (I have never seen that in my experiences. All I've ever seen have been cops who are violent people who enjoy abusing those weaker than them), but in my expeiriences, if you try and resist them, you are setting yourself up for a world of trouble.
But whatever. If you get so easily hurt by words, so be it. For what it's worth, I still think you're a dumb piece of shit with no grasp on just how tough the real world is. Even after being battered by a fucking heap of shit, you didn't learn to duck when the shit comes your way. Get it now?
Fucking moron yourself, nameless (and probably pissed off because I dared criticise his hallowed Israel) chicken fuck. I don't start wars without caring about civillian lives. I don't drop bombs on houses full of children and I don't sell bombs to people who do, so please, cunt face, tell me again why I should be offering solutions?
I don't like police and have been arrested for no reason whatsoever in the past, but if you stunk up your building with weed and then acted like you did, in the face of evidence (the whole world knows how lenient the US is with drugs), trying to deny the obvious, then, I have to say, you only have your own stupidity to blame for your troubles.
Combining this with Speech Recognition: user:"Undelete this file" vista:"unknown command undulate, no wi in fi" user:"restore old version" vista:"Going to MS online store. No new olsen twins tracks" user:"fucking dammit, give me the file from yesterday" vista:"This system has parental controls enabled. Please contact your parents" user:"@#ç$!&%".....
Seriously, though, this is a nice feature, but I can see it chomping through users' 250GB disks like a hummer goes through gas.
First off, I want to add my voice to those that say: Fuck Israel and Fuck Hizbollah. Fuck Hizbollah for dragging Lebanese civillians into a war where they are utterly defenseless. Fuck Israel for so utterly disregarding civillian lives (accidents my fucking arse).
Fuck Israel for being so fucking dumb as to not have learnt its lesson from the last time they invaded Lebanon. Hizbollah won then and Hizbollah is no weaker now. Fuck Israel for being so stupid as to always make disgustingly bad excuses for the wholesale slaughter of civillians. Fuck Israel again for being so numbingly stupid as to not realise that every bomb that falls on Lebanon makes Hizbollah more popular in the Arab world. And again, fuck Israel for achieving what no Iranian Mullah or politician could: unifying the Shia and Sunni sects against Israel and the west.
You think Israel can disarm Hizbollah? You must have also thought that the US could pacify Iraq. Look how well that turned out and how "disarmed" they are.
And Fuck Bush and his cabal of poodles in the UK who are too stupid to see where this is going: Destroying whatever miniscule amount of credibility the US and the UK had in the Arab world and dragging us one step closer to World war 3.
And you know who must be laughing so hard at all of this that they must be pissing themselves: The Russians and the Chinese.
If you code Cocoa applications you're more or less forced to use XCode. You can of course use any text editor and interface builder, but XCode is the only one that is integrated with IB. The small size of the Mac market here and Apple being the 800lb gorilla in that space means that anyone with competing coding tools is at an automatic disadvantage, much like Metrowerks was with Code Warrior. This is a real pity because the lack of competition enables Apple to be very lax about XCode performance and quality.
If you do Java, you have Eclipse or IDEA, both of which are streets ahead of XCode for Java coding. XCode doesn't even compare here.
And if you do Profeesional PHP coding (yes, it does exist), you may as well spend the money on the Zend IDE, since there is no other PHP IDE on OSX that shows classes and offers code completion and debugging as Zend does.
You can of course use Textmate for RoR, since it seems it was engineered with that in mind mainly, but you can do just as well for any of the PHP, Ruby and Python (and Perl, for that matter) group with the respective Eclipse plugins.
I personally use Subethaedit for quick single file editing and Eclipse for anything else. Textmate and BBedit offer me nothing that Exclipse doesn't.
Finally, a good knowledge of vi/vim is a real plus since it's what is easiest to use when you need to edit files quickly in the terminal. Trying to futz around with a GUI editor when you're editing init.d scripts etc is a waste of time. Plus vi will be on any and every Unix type machine you will ever find.
I have no idea how good or successful MS' iPod "killer" will be, but I do know that there is almost certain to be a catch in downloading iTMS bought songs, because, given that iTMS has sold over a billion songs at $1 a piece, it means giving away $1billion at the very least, and MS shareholders might rebel at yet another MS attempt at dominating a market by heavily subsidising a product, and even then, there is certain to be a time limit on that offer ("Good only until the end of the year") or, more likely, attempt to force customers into signing long term subscription terms before they can redeam the offer.
In the end though, it will come down to the ease of use and the brand recognition. The iPod is a very successful brand, and Apple could surely blow it like Sony blew the walkman market, but I'm not so sure they will.
I live and work in Switzerland and our sites have to handle 4 or more languages. When Ruby has unicode support built in, I'll take another look at it. Until then, it's Java, python and php for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit done in the Swiss doesn't make the same bullshit now done in Germany look any better.
That's "in Switzerland", btw.
This hysteria is typical of slashdot and a load of rubbish; Here in Switzerland Computers with internet connections have paid the radio/tv tax for years now, and the sun still shines over the alps. The German law is exactly the same as the Swiss one and works like this:
Each household pays a monthly or quarterly bill to the state run TV and Radio stations. They pay the same amount no matter how many computers, TVs or radios they have. The bill is one single price per household.
Each company pays only one bill no matter how many computers or TVs they have. It is NOT based on the number of computers.
Slashdot and its sensationalist attempts to gather hits and therefore drive up ad revenue make their comments on any news event seem very hypocritical.
I as a person, and my company have been through the OSS problem a number of times. Either extremely bad support for which we were paying (ariadne cms), a bad decision by us leading to enormous inhouse maintenance costs (switching from SuSE to Gentoo) or ending up having to fix some software problems ourselves (OCS/GLPI inventory software). In the end we have decided that even though the support of commercial vendors might cost a lot up front, it is worth its weight in gold if there ever is a problem.
The article is right (although the guy seems to be comparing different types of products to one another, as other have pointed out) in that the costs of OSS can be really damaging.
That said, it would be nice if there were local companies offering support for Linux shops.
Microsoft's biggest problem in the mp3 space is very similar to their biggest problems in the gaming space, portable telephone space and other spaces where they haven't had a monopoly for 15 years: Legacy, baby.
I personally have nothing against Microsoft products. Indeed, I use Windows all day at work and am fairly happy with it. I really hate Microsoft's business practices, though.
But Microsoft suffers from the fact that people who have invested heavily in other products will not be likely to change to an unknown, start from scratch device that offers me no benefits above my iPod. I have spent some $300 on the iTunes Store and even though MS says I can get that all from Microsoft (I'm still waiting for the smallprint on that one - Does Microsoft allow me to burn the stuff to CD or keep it for even if I decide Micorosoft are a bunch of lying fuckers and stop paying?)
Make no m istake, Microsoft will throw money and time at this until it does get a marketshare, much like they did with PDAs (which are now more or less irrelevant), mobile phones (people don't want a fucking start button on their phones you dumb bastards), or game consoles (Say thanks to Sony for fucking up, it certainly wasn't due to your talent you useless bunch of shits)
Stanislav Petrov, thank you for saving our llives.
A Microsoft nerd with hurt feelings comparing a large commercial company, i.e. Micorosoft, to the scientific establishment is a bit less than ingenious. I'll leave as an excercide for you to work out why, sunshine.
I see people, even die hard Windows users, buying either MacBook Pros, or Mac Minis, like its going out of fashion, and I don't even live in the US. In fact, the only people I still see buying Windows are the poor suckers who think Outlook is a good mail client, and that Windows networking is acceptable.
If I was in the Bush family, I could pass nuclear physics by pissing out the window in the morning, or are you trying to claim that the Shrub got where he has without the help of family and friends in high places?
Original: "will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there"
Translation: "We're dumb enough to think that fake positive publicity pressure tricks that work in the USA will work in the EU"
If a boom does finally start in ray traced realtime engines, which I somehow doubt, Microsoft won't like it. They have spent a whole lot of money to make DirectX a monopoly and thereby control the games market. this would push the whole effort overboard, with time. Microsoft would have to make their DirectXRayTrace the sole API before they'd be happy again.
look at my post further up. We use them both and they work extremely well. If you need tips or help, drop me a mail at theolein at gmail dot com. I've even written a custom installer for the OSx client.
At my organisation, we went with two open source projects,OCS NG and GLPI. OCS NG is a client-server solution that uses a client, written in php, but compiled as an exe installer and running as a service on Windows (There's also clients available for Solaris, Linus and OSX), that collects information on hardware and software from the client computer (the source is avaiulable and you can edit it if you want). The OCS NG server collects the data from the clients via an xml-rpc call and sorts and stores them (you can delete clients, filter software into categories etc). The GLPI server is the main helpdesk and tracking app. It works hand-in-hand with the OCS NG server and is really good, and provides detailed data on clients, plus the ability to do financial info on them and reporting.
We have both running on a gentoo server and the level of control is excellent.
The downside is that both are from France. The English translation is less than perfect (but we're in switzerland and so we use it in French). I can only recommed the software though. No licensing issues or huge costs from proprietry vendors adn the ability to modify the source code is a god send. We modified GLPI to print labels via an xsl transform of the xml output to xslfo for Apache's FOP.
I like your posts and you certainly have a very agile mind. I'm terribly sorry to read that you suffer from epilepsy. I wish you all the best.
If anyone remembers the CherryOS fiasco of two years back when that weird Albanian in Hawaii stole the PearPC source and claimed it as his own "80% native ppc speed" clone, the same Leander Kahney wrote one of the biggest bullshit articles I've ever read, claiming that he felt it was the real thing (even though it didn't even get past the boot screen), and that Apple should start worrying about its hardware sales. I wrote to the guy and flamed his butt off for being such a bullshitter. The guy wrote back telling me that I was just being typical of Mac zealots. Fast forward to the present and lo and behold, we have the same brain dead idiot making the same negative "Apple's dying" (but please read my crap anyway) statements like "but that's for the geeks" at a DEVELOPER conference!
The guy is simply a more effeminate version of Dvorak. It's one of those minor trendy things amongst pseudo intellectuals (Boing Boing's rant on Apple because Apple hadn't released the sources to the x86 XNU kernel yet, for instance) to be mildly critical of Apple, YET STILL SPEND GOD KNOWS HOW MUCH TO GO AND WATCH A PRODUCT INTRODUCTION SPEECH! Apple must laugh itself to tears at morons like this who pay large amounts of cash to them for the privilege of being trendily critical of Apple.
Make no mistake, Apple is no saviour and there are many things that I personally prefer in Linux and Windows (Linux for its openess and configurability and Windows for its GUI responsiveness), but acting like a clueless consumer at a developer conference only makes you look dumber than you are, or, in this case, exactly as dumb as you are.
Here, in admittedly tiny Switzerland, we have the highest percentage of Mac users anywhere, period. While I'm one of those and also work with Linux and Windows, the fact is that Macs are incredibly popular, and if people have money (Switzerland is fairly well off), they will buy them. Sweden, for example, which is also fairly well off, also has a high percentage of Mac users. The fact is that Macs are simply a bit simpler to use and somewhat more robust against user wear and tear than Windows.
In Soviet Russia orbital reactors fall on you.
Seriously, that was one minute in Google. Are you at NASA still using paper encyclopeidias?
I didn't aim to insult you personally, even if you feel like I did, but was merely trying to point out that your actions in the face of a cop with his foot in the door (leaning on the door) were less than wise, in my opnion. I don't know if you grew up in a sheltered environment, or had some kind of idea that the police are nice upright citizens (I have never seen that in my experiences. All I've ever seen have been cops who are violent people who enjoy abusing those weaker than them), but in my expeiriences, if you try and resist them, you are setting yourself up for a world of trouble.
But whatever. If you get so easily hurt by words, so be it. For what it's worth, I still think you're a dumb piece of shit with no grasp on just how tough the real world is. Even after being battered by a fucking heap of shit, you didn't learn to duck when the shit comes your way. Get it now?
Yours truly
True Colours
Fucking moron yourself, nameless (and probably pissed off because I dared criticise his hallowed Israel) chicken fuck. I don't start wars without caring about civillian lives. I don't drop bombs on houses full of children and I don't sell bombs to people who do, so please, cunt face, tell me again why I should be offering solutions?
Fucking zombie.
I don't like police and have been arrested for no reason whatsoever in the past, but if you stunk up your building with weed and then acted like you did, in the face of evidence (the whole world knows how lenient the US is with drugs), trying to deny the obvious, then, I have to say, you only have your own stupidity to blame for your troubles.
Combining this with Speech Recognition:
user:"Undelete this file"
vista:"unknown command undulate, no wi in fi"
user:"restore old version"
vista:"Going to MS online store. No new olsen twins tracks"
user:"fucking dammit, give me the file from yesterday"
vista:"This system has parental controls enabled. Please contact your parents"
user:"@#ç$!&%".....
Seriously, though, this is a nice feature, but I can see it chomping through users' 250GB disks like a hummer goes through gas.
First off, I want to add my voice to those that say: Fuck Israel and Fuck Hizbollah. Fuck Hizbollah for dragging Lebanese civillians into a war where they are utterly defenseless. Fuck Israel for so utterly disregarding civillian lives (accidents my fucking arse).
Fuck Israel for being so fucking dumb as to not have learnt its lesson from the last time they invaded Lebanon. Hizbollah won then and Hizbollah is no weaker now. Fuck Israel for being so stupid as to always make disgustingly bad excuses for the wholesale slaughter of civillians. Fuck Israel again for being so numbingly stupid as to not realise that every bomb that falls on Lebanon makes Hizbollah more popular in the Arab world. And again, fuck Israel for achieving what no Iranian Mullah or politician could: unifying the Shia and Sunni sects against Israel and the west.
You think Israel can disarm Hizbollah? You must have also thought that the US could pacify Iraq. Look how well that turned out and how "disarmed" they are.
And Fuck Bush and his cabal of poodles in the UK who are too stupid to see where this is going: Destroying whatever miniscule amount of credibility the US and the UK had in the Arab world and dragging us one step closer to World war 3.
And you know who must be laughing so hard at all of this that they must be pissing themselves: The Russians and the Chinese.
I also am a bit dissapointed with fink, and am considering moving to Darwin ports. I was worried that it too would dissappear and am now relieved.
Thanks.
If you code Cocoa applications you're more or less forced to use XCode. You can of course use any text editor and interface builder, but XCode is the only one that is integrated with IB. The small size of the Mac market here and Apple being the 800lb gorilla in that space means that anyone with competing coding tools is at an automatic disadvantage, much like Metrowerks was with Code Warrior. This is a real pity because the lack of competition enables Apple to be very lax about XCode performance and quality.
If you do Java, you have Eclipse or IDEA, both of which are streets ahead of XCode for Java coding. XCode doesn't even compare here.
And if you do Profeesional PHP coding (yes, it does exist), you may as well spend the money on the Zend IDE, since there is no other PHP IDE on OSX that shows classes and offers code completion and debugging as Zend does.
You can of course use Textmate for RoR, since it seems it was engineered with that in mind mainly, but you can do just as well for any of the PHP, Ruby and Python (and Perl, for that matter) group with the respective Eclipse plugins.
I personally use Subethaedit for quick single file editing and Eclipse for anything else. Textmate and BBedit offer me nothing that Exclipse doesn't.
Finally, a good knowledge of vi/vim is a real plus since it's what is easiest to use when you need to edit files quickly in the terminal. Trying to futz around with a GUI editor when you're editing init.d scripts etc is a waste of time. Plus vi will be on any and every Unix type machine you will ever find.
I have no idea how good or successful MS' iPod "killer" will be, but I do know that there is almost certain to be a catch in downloading iTMS bought songs, because, given that iTMS has sold over a billion songs at $1 a piece, it means giving away $1billion at the very least, and MS shareholders might rebel at yet another MS attempt at dominating a market by heavily subsidising a product, and even then, there is certain to be a time limit on that offer ("Good only until the end of the year") or, more likely, attempt to force customers into signing long term subscription terms before they can redeam the offer.
In the end though, it will come down to the ease of use and the brand recognition. The iPod is a very successful brand, and Apple could surely blow it like Sony blew the walkman market, but I'm not so sure they will.
I live and work in Switzerland and our sites have to handle 4 or more languages. When Ruby has unicode support built in, I'll take another look at it. Until then, it's Java, python and php for me.